This is an important lesson for anyone selling products with an affiliate program.

Your affiliates are working hard for you, so give them credit for their work and go the extra mile to keep them promoting for you... and reap the rewards.

I'm an affiliate for over 150 vendors and get requests to promote products daily, so I have to be careful who I choose. It's the same issue for many of my colleagues, some of whom are super-affiliates generating over $50k per month in revenue for merchants.

After making sure the marketer is legit, one of my first technical questions is how do they track the sales? If it's some cookie-based product I tend to shy away, as cookies are becoming less reliable to track referrals.

Secondly, how well do they manage situations where affiliates are offering bonuses and customers decide after the fact which affiliate they'd like to give credit.

The first question can easily be answered BEFORE a promotion, but the second one is usually an unknown answer until it happens. 

I'm an affiliate of John Reese's latest product Traffic Secrets 2.0 and am impressed with a couple of his policies re these 2 questions:

1) They really try hard to give the correct affiliate credit for the referral and clearly go beyond simply using cookies... up to a point (which is fine with me). See their policy here:

 

Q. How are referrals tracked in your system? Is it a "last cookie" system?

Yes, it's a "last cookie" system, and this is how it works...

When you refer someone to the site they will be cookied as usual.  But if they opt-in we will also hard-code a record in our database to securely match this person with your affiliate account. So should someone place an order later without their cookie, whether they use a different browser to go back to the site, or they use a different computer in their house or at another location, etc, we'll still be able to track them by their email address.

Even if they call our office due to some rare problem with the order form and they want to place their order over the phone, when we enter their order in our system it will automatically look for this hard-coded opt-in record so we can credit YOU with the sale because you've rightfully earned it (instead of us getting 100% of the revenue).

However, let's say someone opts-in to your affiliate link, originally, but they decide to buy through someone else's link to get their bonus...

If a person decides to order through ANOTHER affiliate's link (even if they already opted in via your aff. link) the affiliate sending them through the LAST COOKIE URL gets the credit.  So in this case, the user with the bonus offer that someone is clicking that link for, and then ordering, will get the commission.

Therefore, we'll hard code the affiliate link so that once you've got someone to opt-in, they are yours no matter what, UNLESS that prospect actually clicks on a DIFFERENT affiliate's link to ultimately make their purchase.

This way, if you successfully get someone to opt-in through your affiliate link, and they ultimately order through your link, through a generic URL, on a different computer, etc., you get the credit. If they decide to take advantage of someoneelse's affiliate bonus, for instance, it's only right, though, that we allow them to have that freedom. So the other affiliate would get the credit if that prospect orders through their link instead of yours.

2) I offered a bonus to my subscribers (which is still valid) that I would either

i) spend 30 min. with them providing a one-to-one critique focused on their online marketing strategy and affiliate program, or

ii) hand them a copy of my latest product Facebook Payday ($77 value)

...if they bought TS2.0 via my link here and sent me the receipt + their choice of bonus via my support desk

I made it clear that I haven't totally reviewed the product yet,so the purchasers needed to proceed with caution.

I have one client who went ahead and invested in TS2.0 and after a week we realized he hadn't ordered via my link. So I was forced to hound their poor affiliate manager Andy with requests and status updates about this.

I was promised that it would all be taken care of and not only did they take care of it, but they blew me away when I got this email from John Reese this morning:

Hi Peter,

A quick 'news' update for all of
our valued TS2 affiliates...

We have completed our thorough
audit.  We analyzed hundreds of
specific requests and remedied
any problems with customers
that wanted to sign up under a certain
affiliate yet were credited to another
affiliate.

Here's What I Decided To Do...

If there was a customer that meant
to order through another affiliate's
link (but was credited to someone
else) we 'moved' this customer to
the other affiliate and credited that
affiliate with the $200 commission.

HOWEVER...

For the original affiliate that technically
'lost' that customer and commission
I decided to PAY THEM TOO!

That's right.  I'm also going to pay
that original affiliate a $200 commission
even, though, they didn't end up referring
the sale.  So no affiliate will LOSE any
commissions they had thought they
earned -- even if someone legitimately
did not intent to order through their link.

So on many sales we're paying out
over 100% and losing money.

But I decided to make this business decision
to demonstrate to you, and to the rest of
our valued affiliates, how much we appreciate
your support.

If you had a customer 'moved into' your
account you will now see their name and
the entry for the $200 commission.

If you had a customer 'moved out' of your
account you will see an entry
that says, "BONUS REFERRAL" and
you will also see the $200 earned.

THANK YOU for supporting our product
and we look forward to paying you a
bunch of $200 commissions for many
years to come...

Because if you didn't realize it, TS2 is
going to stay on the market -- millions
of business owners NEED this course.

So there's a tremendous opportunity
for you to continue to make money
by promoting it on an ongoing basis.

* We'll be releasing the original videos
as well as modifying the sales page
soon so it will be well positioned for
long-term sales.

Thanks again.  And please know,
we sincerely APPRECIATE YOU! :-)

*** And just to let you know... we had
some minor issues with shipping the
course and those have all been resolved
and the course is shipping just fine now.

Yours For Online Profits,

John Reese

It's because of policies like that, that I support John Reese's affiliate program.

This is the type of marketer I will continue to recommend.

I must give a disclaimer that I have not had a chance to entirely review TS2.0 as it's just shipping this week. Once my client has a copy or if I manage to get a review copy I will be able to give more advice on the product itself.

But as for John's affiliate program it's a winner. Do you treat your affiliates like gold as John does?

You can get instant information about Traffic Secrets 2.0 here. 

--- (Edited on 8/14/2008 8:45 pm [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---